The halfway mark

Today, February 1st, we are half way through our time in Mazatlan.  It's gone by very quickly and we find the days flying by.  We have slipped into a relaxing pattern to our days that incudes taking the dogs to the park, shopping for food, going for walks, meeting friends, studying Spanish, reading, gardening, (this a view of part of the patio).....

We're also going to the beach (although not nearly as much as we were at first), cooking, drawing and painting, going downtown, cleaning the house, doing laundry, taking photos, volunteering with the dogs at the pound, going to the library....  Well, really it's not that different from our life on Haliburton Hill (except for the warm weather part).

Harry is more content with things than I am.  If find I'm really missing some of my women friends and spending so much time together with "husband" is a challenge at times.  I'm glad I have my oil painting group on Fridays so we can have some time apart.  I've met some interesting women (this is Wendy beginning a painting)....

... and Harry enjoys chatting with some of the guys who live on the street.  Mostly we've met English-speaking people though and that's a bit of a disappointment.  But I think that until our Spanish becomes more fluent it's too much of a struggle to communicate.  We did go out for lunch the other day with two Mexican women, Maria and Violetta, who volunteer with the conversational group.  Their English is about at the same level as our Spanish so we lurched back and forth between languages and enjoyed ourselves.  But even so there is a big cultural gap that we're not yet capable of bridging.  And it's hard work.  We came home exhausted.

February brings a visit from my brother and his family and Carnaval in the middle of the month and then there's still March to experience.  There's still lots of time to enjoy our winter in the sun, but it's really just living a normal life.